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Cambridge Coincidences Collection

Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University wants to know about your coincidences!

I have found a long lost second cousin through family tree searches, our grandmothers were sisters. His and my father had the same Birthday date, 4 July but not the same year. He is 30 years older than his father, I am 30 years older than my father, he and I are 30 years separate in age! His birthday is 21 Mar and mine 23 March.

Hi,
My Name is Mark Smyth.
On 5th July 2008 I was at Twickenham for the Iron Maiden Somewhere Back In Time Tour (According to wikipedia 44,672 tickets were sold).
The 4 of us attending (Myself, my mate Kevin and 2 guys we'd met at our digs) were standing and decided to pick a spot the the left of the sound stage in the centre of the pitch as this gave us an excellent view on the stage.
About halfway through the gig I spotted a familiar face walking towards me through the crowd from the stage.

I was staying outside Hereford on my brother's stag do a year ago and got chatting to some women as you do. The subject came round to middle names, as mine is quite strange and I was tasked with guessing hers. Straight away I said 'Michael', which you would not associate with an English female middle name. Anyway, she then pulled out her driving licence with her middle name stated as 'Michael'
On Christmas Eve I went out for a few drinks with some friends in my local Wetherspoon's in Newton Abbot in the afternoon.

I had my stag party in 1999 in dublin. As ususally happens I was subjected to a practical joke of being made to wear HUGE underpants and a blow up sheep, and thats all!
A few years later I went up to Glasgow to see Newcastle United play a friendly match against Celtic. While in one of the bars in Glasgow I got chatting to the bar staff and found out she was Irish.

When 18 and inter-railing around Europe we arrived at our first camp site in Avignon to find that we has no tent pegs.... On leaving the campsite to try and find a shop to buy some we walked into some friends who had left school the previous year who had a spare set of tent pegs!!!

I was listening to a Killers album on CD one day, when I wandered into another room and switched on a radio. The song playing on the radio was not only the same track (Mr Brightside), but the two songs were perfectly synchronized. I turned the radio volume up, and there was no discernible difference in timings. When there is a delay, even a slight one, it is very obvious to the listener.
It occurred to me that the radio must be acting as a speaker by some strange phenomenon, but then the song finished and my CD moved on to the next track while the radio DJ introduced another song.

About 10 years ago I was poking around Corbridge parish church about 12 miles west of Newcastle. A quartet were practising for a concert they were giving in the church that night. I had a chat to the slightly Beethovian cellist and quartet leader, and I asked him where he was from - they were giving the concert as part of a small local festival.
Oh, from the south east, he said.
I was from the south east, so I asked where. Oh, from a place called Berkhamsted, he said.
I was from Berkhamsted (a town between Watford and Aylesbury), so I asked where.

Returning from a Honeymoon in Bali the flight stopped off at Abu Dabi airport to refuel. My wife and I decided to leave the plane and have a quick look around the duty free shops in the terminal. I went to one shop and was standing at the electronics counter when I recognised a voice next to me. The person was a work colleague who was on his way back from a holiday in Australia but had missed the flight he was supposed to be on and ended up on a different flight that meant he had to change planes at Abi Dabi.